Why all the tantrums against tourists?

I’ve often had occasion to smirk to myself on hearing that a friend plans to ‘travel’. Usually what they really mean is they’re about to go on an all-inclusive holiday to a resort in southern Europe and sit on their bum by a swimming pool for a week. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – it’s definitely my favourite thing to do in hot countries. But why won’t they admit that they’re ‘tourists’, instead of pretending that they’re ‘travellers’?

Being a tourist is like being a drunkard. No one thinks they are one. It’s always that bad person over there, whereas one merely appreciates the finer things in life, including a litre of Côtes du Lubéron over a leisurely lunch. Some Europhiles take this even further, from the personal to the geopolitical, and ascribe good and bad ways of drinking to whole nations. Hence the cliché about binge-drinking English lager louts vs wine-savouring French bons viveurs. This conveniently ignores the fact that not only do the French consume more alcohol than us, but they also die more often of alcohol-induced cirrhosis. A recent estimate concluded that one in three adults in France has a drink problem. All that Remainer smuggery about the French learning to drink sensibly from childhood is sadly misplaced.

It’s similarly easy to imagine the most petulant enemies of Brexit taking a perverse pride on reading that British tourists in the Canary Islands were recently disturbed while sunbathing by angry mobs of locals. (The Canaries are, after all, a popular destination among those rotters whom Sunday Times columnist India Knight once singled out as ‘the people you always see in airports having pints for breakfast’.) This week, protesters swarmed the beaches of Lanzarote, Tenerife and Fuerteventura wielding banners reading ‘GO HOME TOURIST!’, while chanting ‘More tourists, more misery!’ and ‘This beach is ours!’.

Back in the spring there was even a ‘hunger strike’ in the Tenerife town of La Laguna. Six ‘activists’ were protesting about tourism in general, as well as the proposed construction of a five-star hotel on an unspoiled beach in particular. Though their hunger strike was touted as ‘indefinite’, they actually packed it in after 20 days – so more of a ‘beach-ready’ body-tweak, then.

Still, the fact that such a protest was ever embarked upon demonstrates how anti-tourist sentiment has developed into a mass hysteria better suited to Medieval times, when we all crouched grimly in the place we were born, having sex with our blood relatives and becoming our own grandpas, because we thought beyond our own backyard that ‘Here Be Dragonnes’ (or now, ‘Here Be Sexe On Ye Beache’).

These tantrums have been sweeping the cultural fleshpots of Europe for some time now, with everywhere from Amsterdam to Venice to Barcelona complaining about foreigners coming over and taking their street food. But it’s only recently that places synonymous with tourism, which no one might ever have heard of without it, are throwing their beach toys out of the pram, as in the Canaries.

It’s happening in Majorca, too. According to the Telegraph, at the beginning of this year’s tourist season, campaigers Mallorca Platja Tour ‘rallied recruits to “occupy the beaches”’ and ‘greeted bewildered tourists with cries of “Go, go, go!” – and cheered as they hurriedly took their leave’. More recently, banners were hung from balconies with the slogan ‘SOS residents – stop over-tourism’. Ironically, similar banners were unfurled in the wake of the pandemic, with the words turismo, meaning ‘save tourism’.

Joan Pla, CEO of Blau Hotels in Majorca, has blamed the rise of ‘digital platforms’ and in particular ‘the emergence of Airbnb’ for this growing conflict between tourists and locals. ‘We are already in another phase, in which the homes that are built for residents are bought by foreigners to spend a few months. It does not surprise me that there are demonstrations like those that have taken place in the Canary Islands, which could also occur here.’ Hotel bosses in Benidorm have also admitted to being worried by the Canary Islands protests.

Ironically, there was none of this trouble when people were still happy to be tourists – to stay in hotels and eat in tourist restaurants. It started with the silly snobs who hated thinking of themselves as tourists, and instead decided that they wanted to be travellers – to have the holiday equivalent of the ‘girlfriend experience’. This gave rise to the monumentally presumptuous Airbnb slogan ‘Live like a local’. Like ‘haggling’ (another unpleasant ‘traveller’ thing to do), favouring private homes – which might otherwise be sold or rented to locals – over hotels is a sure way of doing over the natives, raising property prices and certifying that the offspring of said locals will find it difficult to stay in their neighbourhoods. We happy tourists are far more user-friendly, stashed neatly away in hotels and resorts, providing steady work for a vast number of locals and leaving neighbourhoods as real communities, as opposed to handy roosting posts for birds of passage on a bender.

Some self-deluded souls even seem to think that if you call yourself a traveller rather than a tourist, locals will like you more. But we tourists don’t scrounge in the streets whereas travellers increasingly do, as seen in the rise of the gap-year ‘beg-packers’ currently passing off pampered entitlement as roughing it, to the understandable disgust of many citizens of south-east Asia.

I’ve always been a total tourist, and never once thought of myself as a ‘traveller’. (‘World traveller’ is even worse, usually indicating a seriously annoying bongo habit.) As for my own relationship with the Canary Islands, for a decade I spent many a happy week bi-annually at a hotel in Tenerife. Okay, it was a Ritz-Carlton hotel, specifically the Abama resort, and it was eye-wateringly expensive. But I was still proud to call myself a tourist. Calling yourself a traveller doesn’t mean you’re better – it just means you’re a ponce.

Britain’s jumped-up prole-loathers may be pleased to see our tourists having sand kicked in their faces. But you can just imagine the reaction if working-class Londoners started telling tourists from across the globe to go back where they came from. The air would be thick with accusations of xenophobia and racism.

No, when it comes to tourism, it’s best to count your blessings and be grateful that you live in a place that loads of people want to visit – the opposite of those sad, dying towns scattered all over Europe where you can buy a house for a fiver because no one wants to be there.

I’ve walked the walk on this. I left Bristol, a beautiful city not greatly troubled by tourism, because I found it dull and the people too familiar. I first moved to London, thronging with tourists, which I loved as a youngster. Then, 30 years ago, I moved to Brighton and Hove, a city built by and sustained by tourism. Though the beach is beautiful when deserted, I yearn for the tourist throngs of summer. Yet I’ve met so many huffing half-wits – who invariably came here from a far-less-blessed bit of the British Isles – who come over all Hyacinth Bucket, regular as clockwork in June, July and August.

The fact is that everyone’s a tourist when they go somewhere other than the place they live and are looking for fun. So, ‘travellers’, why not try seeing yourself as part of the merry throng for once, rather than special, highly sensitive souls who must be protected at all costs from the sound of the crowd? Who knows, you might even have fun for once in your fussy, prissy little lives.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Her book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics, is published by Academica Press.